wordpress-develop | WordPress Develop , Git-ified | Content Management System library

I have followed the Wordpress quick start tutorial to get my local dev environment setup. However, I am trying to setup my local environment to use local.mysite.com instead of the default localhost http://localhost:8080. I've added local.mysite.com to my hosts file and updated all of the urls in the database to point towards local.mysite.com. But I can not access the site in my browser.

I've searched for a while, but the only solutions I found say that I need to add a reverse proxy to the docker-compose (https://objectpartners.com/2020/09/01/local-wordpress-development-with-docker/), but they don't explain why that is required. My understanding is that port 80 is bound to my wp image and as such http requests should be routed directly to it.

Looking to understand either how to properly set this up to use a custom url without a reverse proxy, or to get a much better understanding as to why one is required.

I have a wordpress website with this free theme: https://wordpress.org/themes/minimal-grid/

I'm seeing some unusual behaviour, which isn't a problem and I can fix by removing the element, but I don't know why it's happening and would like to understand it.

At the end of each post, there is a link to the previous and next post. When I hover over these, the background of the element darkens slightly. Where there is an image as background, it doesn't disappear, just darkens. Here's a page that demonstrates: https://5diraptor.com/todoist-task-project-manager/

The unusual part is there doesn't seem to be any :hover selectors which actually tells it to do this, so I'd like to understand why it's happening. Below is the HTML:

I'm using the Kirki plugin to add fields and sections in the WordPress customizer. So far, I can get a field to be added to the customizer, but I'm confused on how to return that data back into my theme. I'm kinda tired so I might be missing something. This is what I have so far: